Early 20th-Century Trolley Tracks Found in Washington State

Contractors dug up history last week when rails from Walla Walla’s trolley system dating back to 1906 were removed from Whitman Street between First and Second avenues.

The tracks once connected Walla Walla residents to downtown, Pioneer Park, the Walla Walla County Fairgrounds, cemetery, and many other key stops before automobiles became the common transportation mode.

For 5 cents, Walla Wallan’s could take a trip around the city’s central portion, and as far as Pleasant Street or Prospects Heights. Stops included colleges, local businesses and an opera house.

About 450 linear feet of those trolley tracks were dug up to replace the sewer main underneath them as part of the Third and Maple Infrastructure Repair and Replacement Plan Project, including water, sewer and road improvements expected to be complete in October, city officials said Tuesday.

The removal of trolley tracks is permitted because of measures taken to mitigate the impact of the loss of the tracks. These efforts included hiring Fort Walla Walla Musem to conduct an archeological survey, research and report on the trolley system in 2011 when a different project called for the removal of the tracks.

Other efforts included interpretative signage placed along the former trolley line near Sharpstein School and at modern bus stops on the former trolley line, a Powerpoint presentation on the trolley system used for public education purposes and a publication of an article.

When part of the rail was removed in 2011, archeologists took a piece of it. The rail had a date on it and listed the manufacturer, confirming the research, said Mike Laughery, the city’s capital programs engineer.

That piece is at Fort Walla Walla Museum and if needed, can be curated, made part of the museum, and put on display.

With these steps, the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation continue to grant permission for removal of the tracks for each infrastructure project the city plans, so far, Laughery said.

Another step in honoring the history could be incorporating a segment of railroad tracks into the design, Laughery said. That would mean removing the original tracks, rebuilding the utilities, and then setting the new tracks back in the roadway, so they are still visibly present, he said.

That idea has not yet been required, he said.

According to the 2011 report, exposed trolley tracks create safety hazards for pedestrians and cyclists. Leaving tracks beneath asphalt leads to premature failure of that street surface, and pavement failure associated with the tracks was discovered in various locations where buried rails exist.

Some of the trolley tracks remained much longer than they were in use, and portions can still be seen on Whitman Street between Howard and Division streets, near the intersection of Clinton and Boyer streets and along North Sixth Avenue to Cherry Street. The trolley only operated 20 years before the automobile became so common that the line had to close down in 1926.

“I don’t know what the financial investment was back then but it had to have been substantial,” Laughery said. “I don’t know if they just didn’t foresee the development of the automobile or how that played out.”

Trolley cars would hold 28 to 72 passengers and were equipped with onboard electric motors. Overhead wires supplied electricity to the cars through metal rods extending from the roof, according to an article published by Maury Mule of the Fort Walla Walla Museum.

The trolley cars had two-piece windows allowing for air during hot summer days and maintaining heat in the colder months with an onboard coal-fired stove providing heat to the car, the article stated.

The trolley operated in conjunction with an interurban line, which closed in 1931 and ran about 13 miles south to the Oregon cities of Milton and Freewater, the article stated. Spur lines and connections to national rail networks would appear.

No other discoveries were reported when the contractors removed the tracks, Laughery said. Project contractor Total Site Services now owns the tracks, and if no one wants them, they will probably be scrapped, according to city staff.

For further information, call the city’s Engineering Division at 509-527-4537.

A lost city discovered by Archaeologists when they explore a rural field in Kansas

In the Great Plains of Kansas, archaeologists have made an innovative and unlikely discovery: a vast town lost centuries ago. Donald Blakeslee discovered a few years ago the lost city of Etzanoa in Arkansas City, Kan, a Wichita State University anthropologist, and an archaeology professor. 

In that small city in south-central Kansas, local residents found the arrowhead and the gold mine underneath their town, pottery, and other ancient artefacts, for decades, in the fields and rivers of the region.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Blakeslee used newly translated documents written by the Spanish conquistadors who came across the land over 400 years ago to determine that these artifacts were once part of the Native American lost city of Etzanoa.

“‘I thought, ‘Wow, their eyewitness descriptions are so clear it’s like you were there,’” Blakeslee told the Times about reading the conquistador’s accounts. “I wanted to see if the archaeology fit their descriptions. Every single detail matched this place.”

The city of Etzanoa is believed to have been around from 1450 to 1700 and was home to approximately 20,000 people. Blakeslee said that the city was the second-largest settlement in the present-day United States at the time and spanned across at least five miles of the space between the Walnut and Arkansas rivers.

The 20,000 inhabitants of Etzanoa were said to have lived in “thatched, beehive-shaped houses.”

In 1541, conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado came to the town hoping to discover its fabled gold but instead found Native Americans in a collection of settlements that he called Quivira.

Sixty years later in 1601, Juan de Oñate led a team of 70 conquistadors from New Mexico to Quivira, also hoping to find its gold but they ran into a tribe called the Escanxaques, who told them of the nearby city of Etzanoa.

Oñate and his team arrived at the city and were greeted peacefully by the inhabitants of Etzanoa. However, things quickly went south when the conquistadors started taking hostages, which then caused the city’s residents to flee in fear.

The group of conquistadors explored the vast area of more than 2,000 houses but feared an attack from the peoples they dislodged and decided to return home.

On their return trip, they were attacked by some 1,000 members of the Escanxaque tribe and a huge battle took place. The conquistadors lost and returned home to New Mexico, never to come back to the area again.

French explorers came nearly a century later to that part of south-central Kansas but did not find any evidence of Etzanoa or its people. It is believed that disease caused the untimely demise of the population.

However, traces of the people and their city would not stay hidden forever. Blakeslee and a team of excavators found the site of the ancient battle in a neighborhood in Arkansas City and found remanents from the battle.

Locals in the area had been uncovering artifacts from the lost city for decades but didn’t understand why until evidence of the city itself was discovered by Blakeslee.

“Lots of artifacts have been taken from here,” Warren “Hap” McLeod, a resident of Arkansas City who lives on the spot where the battle took place, told the Times. “Now we know why. There were 20,000 people living here for over 200 years.” One local resident said that the sheer amount of artifacts that people in the area have is mindblowing.

“My boss had an entire basement full of pottery and all kinds of artefacts,” Russell Bishop told the Times. “We’d be out there working and he would recognize a black spot on the ground as an ancient campfire site … I don’t think anyone knew how big this all was. I’m glad they’re finally getting to the bottom of it.”

The Great Plains were long-regarded as huge, empty spaces in ancient times that were populated mainly by nomadic tribes. But Blakeslee’s discovery of Etzanoa could prove that some of the tribes in the area weren’t nomadic and were actually more urban than previously believed.

Blakeslee has also discovered evidence that similar, large-scale lost cities could be located in nearby counties which might have been around during the time of Etzanoa. These latest groundbreaking archaeological finds are helping researchers fill in huge blanks in early American history.

1.8-million-year-old skull gives a glimpse of our evolution

The finding of a 1.8 million-year-old skull from a human ancestor found in a medieval Georgian village is a dramatic example of early evolution and shows that our ancestral tree has fewer branches than some believe, researchers say.

The fossil is the most complete pre-human skull uncovered. With other partial remains previously found at the rural site, it gives researchers the earliest evidence of human ancestors moving out of Africa and spreading north to the rest of the world, according to a study published in the journal Science.

The skull and other remains offer a glimpse of a population of pre-humans of various sizes living at the same time – something that scientists had not seen before for such an ancient era. This diversity bolsters one of two competing theories about the way our early ancestors evolved, spreading out more like a tree than a bush.

Nearly all of the previous pre-human discoveries have been fragmented bones, scattered over time and locations – like a smattering of random tweets of our evolutionary history. The findings at Dmanisi are more complete, weaving more of a short story. Before the site was found, the movement from Africa was put at about 1 million years ago.

When examined with the earlier Georgian finds, the skull “shows that this special immigration out of Africa happened much earlier than we thought and a much more primitive group did it,” said study lead author David Lordkipanidze, director of the Georgia National Museum. “This is important to understanding human evolution.”

For years, some scientists have said humans evolved from only one or two species, much like a tree branches out from a trunk, while others say the process was more like a bush with several offshoots that went nowhere.

Even bush-favoring scientists say these findings show one single species nearly 2 million years ago at the former Soviet republic site. But they disagree that the same conclusion can be said for bones found elsewhere, such as Africa.

However, Lordkipanidze and colleagues point out that the skulls found in Georgia are different sizes but are considered to be the same species. So, they reason, it’s likely the various skulls found in different places and times in Africa may not be different species, but variations in one species.

To see how a species can vary, just look in the mirror, they said.

“Danny DeVito, Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal are the same species,” Lordkipanidze said.

The adult male skull found wasn’t from our species, Homo sapiens. It was from an ancestral species – in the same genus or class called Homo – that led to modern humans. Scientists say the Dmanisi population is likely an early part of our long-lived primary ancestral species, Homo erectus.

Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, wasn’t part of the study but praised it as “the first good evidence of what these expanding hominids looked like and what they were doing.”

Fred Spoor at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, a competitor and proponent of a busy family tree with many species disagreed with the study’s overall conclusion, but he lauded the Georgia skull discovery as critical and even beautiful.

“It really shows the process of evolution in action,” he said.

Spoor said it seems to have captured a crucial point in the evolutionary process where our ancestors transitioned from Homo habilis to Homo erectus – although the study authors said that depiction is going a bit too far.

The researchers found the first part of the skull, a large jaw, below a medieval fortress in 2000. Five years later – on Lordkipanidze’s 42nd birthday – they unearthed the well-preserved skull, gingerly extracted it, putting it into a cloth-lined case and popped champagne. It matched the jaw perfectly.

They were probably separated when our ancestor lost a fight with a hungry carnivore, which pulled apart his skull and jaw bones, Lordkipanidze said.

The skull was from an adult male just shy of 5 feet (1.5 meters) with a massive jaw and big teeth, but a small brain, implying limited thinking capability, said study co-author Marcia Ponce de Leon of the University of Zurich. It also seems to be the point where legs are getting longer, for walking upright, and smaller hips, she said.

“This is a strange combination of features that we didn’t know before in early Homo,” Ponce de Leon said.

When the Smithsonian discovered an ancient Egyptian colony in the Grand Canyon

At 277 miles (445 kilometers) long, up to 18 miles (28 kilometers) wide, and 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) deep, the Grand Canyon is one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring places in the United States.

The Hopi Indians believe it is the gateway to the afterlife. Its sheer immensity and mystery attracted more than 6 million visitors in 2016.

But what those people probably don’t know is that the Grand Canyon might once have been the home of an entire underground civilization.

But where are they now? And why did they abandon the canyon? Hosts Matt Frederick, Ben Bowlin, and Noel Brown jump straight into the folklore, the legends, and of course, the conspiracies to find out what really happened to the Grand Canyon’s Lost Civilization in this episode of Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know.

It all started in 1909 when purported Smithsonian Institution explorer G.E. Kincaid discovered strange caverns during an expedition directed by Smithsonian anthropologist S.A. Jordan. The entrance to the cavern was nearly inaccessible, but Kincaid was able to get in to make an incredible discovery.

The enormous caves, which radiated out from a center cavern-like spokes on a wheel, were full of artifacts, including statues, copper weapons, even granaries full of seeds. Its size indicated that 50,000 people could live inside comfortably.

But even more amazingly, the artifacts didn’t match up to anything in the known record. Rather than appearing to be of Native American origin, as one might expect, the objects had distinct Egyptian or Tibetan designs. Could there actually have been an entire civilization of Egyptians living there? If so, how did they get there?

The story caused a huge sensation when it broke in the Arizona Gazette in 1909, but was soon met with skepticism: The Smithsonian has no record of either of the scientists, nor their discoveries, and firmly quells any claims that Egyptian artifacts have been found in either North or South America.

And no one has been able to find these supposedly massive caves since. Was this some elaborate hoax, may be perpetrated by the Gazette to sell papers?

That’s certainly a possibility, but it doesn’t fly for many conspiracy theorists. Some argue that the Smithsonian Institution has purposely wiped Kincaid and Jordan from their records and actively destroyed artifacts that don’t agree with the “status quo story” of human history.

Others think the caves hold a passage to the fourth dimension, where the reptilians (yep!) who have secretly run the world for thousands of years emerge into our world. Still, others believe the area is top-secret and closely guarded, like Area 51.

So is this series of caverns proof of a long-lost, possibly Egyptian civilization that’s simply being covered up by the Smithsonian, or is it a passageway into this dimension for our reptilian overlords? One thing is for sure.